A blog about Lisp, general topics that interest me, and other programming languages, in that order.

Friday, November 10, 2006

Practical Ocaml - And I had such high hopes

If you go back to my first posting, you'll see that before Common Lisp the language I used for home programming was OCaml. I still prefer Lisp's uniform syntax and macros, but Ocaml has a soft spot in my heart.

That's why I was looking forward to Apress' "Practical OCaml", which was going to be OCaml's answer to "Pratical Common Lisp", even doing some of the same projects - good for comparison.

Well, reviews are coming in, and the short version is, except for the prose and the code, the book's just fine. For the sarcasm impaired, the amazon reviews are all one star, and even the book's technical reviewer is not thrilled with it.

Some reviewers are even concerned that this will discourage others from writing a good OCaml book or learning OCaml. Thank you, Peter, for doing such a good job on "Pracital Common Lisp".

I supposed that part of the strategy was to have a series of books that basically had the same progression, sample projects and so forth. The idea being that this would make it easier to move between languages. If this was the idea would the execution of that idea be any way better? Or is it still awful?